Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/510

 496 HUBERT FOSTON : and animation to the ideal arranging of the Xoyo?, the intelli- gent speech. IV. DISGUISED IDEAL CONTEOL OF CONDITIONAL SIGNIFICANCE. The general name, viewed out of relation to its possible attributive or predicative contexts, may strikingly imply a de- termination, in some yet widely indefinite direction perhaps,, of the idea of the significance of the objects of which it is a name. For it marks off a certain limit of considered capacity in the object. But it is of special importance to observe that it also involves an arrest of such determination so far as it leaves it to various possible, but now unformed, verbal con- junctions to reflect possible determinations of the object's capacity into more and more definite channels. For example the name " fluid " applied to an object only very indefinitely suggests what the object may ultimately do for me, and mean in my life : still less does it determine in what special manner the object is to be expected 1 at any time to realise some one or other of those possible functions the ideas of which cluster about the name " fluid ". These ideas of possible functions,, issues, significances, cluster about it in mutual suppression. They make it a centre of suspended associative suggestion for them all. They thus have shares, perhaps variously distant and subtle, in constituting its raison d'etre, its ground of serviceableness ; though every one of them, rising from the midst of multitudinous latency as occasions severally hale them forth from their conspiracy of mutual suppression, can easily conceal its share and thus give rise to what I consider the inadequate view of the concept in which significances are forgotten. The significances, then, by help of association with a name, are indeterminately held arrested in suspense as more or less sub-consciously recognised possibilities. And it wants now that other suggestive words, which likewise in their isolation hold significances in suspense, should bring in 1 " Expectation," in my compressed and sufficiently burdened exposi- tion, must be understood, by the reader's candour, to cover even such expectations of the past (to speak paradoxically, but not Hibernically), as an exponent of Geology may form as he carries on his thinking in the newly and imaginatively re-created world of ages ago. It covers simi- larly my sense of the once open possibilities of things as they were ten years ago both those since sealed as actualities on realised conditions, and those negatively sealed as possibilities in relation to now only im- aginable conditions. . . . The breathless suspense in which we may trace afresh the lines of some already familiar history is a psychological revela- tion, I believe, of what is still true when less vividly evident.